How we moved the media format of loan and lease applications to the service format and increased the number of applications by one-third and started making bigger profits.

av.by is a online board for car sales. 4 platforms are web mobile, web desktop, android and ios apps. We have quite a big post base of 55 000 posts. Our company is 60 people and we have 1 500 000 users per month. This is the largest platform for the sale of cars in Belarus.

av.by finance is a separate product embedded in the post board. This product enables to buy a car on credit or leasing.

Problem and research

The lease application used to look like this. Under the price. This is just a banner that is linked to the page of the leasing company’s website. For simplicity, I will unite all car buyers in Belarus with one person. His name is Vova, say hello to him :-)

Vova needs to get a loan or lease. And we need more completed applications. We receive money from financial companies for each submitted application. We had an insight from user interviews that 72% of car transactions are made with the help of a loan or lease. This is a big market and we want to make money on it.

It is difficult for Vova to choose a loan because now only one financial offer is shown on the card. He has nothing to compare it with. Plus, each financial institution has its own website and its own application form. When Vova fills in several, it is difficult for him because they are all different and you need to figure it out again.

Yet we understand that if we give Vova a solution, we will be able to earn more on loans and leases. Success is an increase in the number of applications by 20%. We have a lot of such Vovas, 300 000 people a month. It is worth it to do such a task.

We conducted 12 interviews. 5 with financial companies 7 with buyers, we carried out an analysis of competitors and came up with 6 solutions.

Ideas

1. List all car loans or leases in one place.
2. A formalized list of available car loans 
or leases on the car card.
3. Promotion tools in car loans or leases list.
4. Mass submission of a request for all available 
car loans or leases.
5. Automatic transfer of the application from one company to another, if the first company refused.
6. Analytics for financial companies so that they could improve their car loans or leases.

Surely, I met with the engineers to estimate the complexity of implementing each solution. Together with the product manager, we estimated the effectiveness of each solution. Based on these two parameters, we prioritized solutions. As a result, they refused to automatically transfer the application from one company to another and from analytics.

Next, I will detail first four solutions.

1. List all car loans or leases in one place

Vova is opening the  menu and sees a new product Finance, taps it. Next, Vova sees all the loans and leases for buying a car or other transport. Vova sees the parameters, compares them, and sends the request. Vova can also open the car loan or lease page and explore it in more detail. Most importantly, we made a product management system inside the project with formalized parameters.

We conducted 5 corridor tests that helped us find bad places in the interface. We expected that this would definitely affect the growth in the number of applications. We started making money on the subscription fee for the placement, which gave us an additional revenue stream.

2. A formalized list of available car loans 
or leases on the car card

On the left, I showed the previous lease offer. Let me remind you that when Vova clicked, we transfer to the website of a financial company. It worked like a banner ad. Immediately below the price, you can see that this car can be purchased on credit or on lease.

At the end of the card, I show the best offers and give the opportunity to view all the products by clicking on the button. Now we already have formalized car loans and leases and we can show not one, but several loans at once so that Vova could choose the right one.

So, there are two places on the card where we advertise car loans. We built the architecture so that the entire list of suitable car loans would be displayed in a modal window. To provide access to the list anywhere, we will create a good user experience. We did not come to this immediately. There were disputes with the product manager, but my version outwon on the corridor tests.

So Vova can only send applications one by one. We expected that this would definitely affect the growth in the number of applications.

3. Promotion tools in car loans or leases list

It will give us extra money for services. Any company can buy a promotion. Instead of our finance service, we will show the final loan or lease. I don’t think that this will give us an increase in applications, but we can make money on it.

4. Mass submission of a request for all available 
car loans or leases

When Vova opens the list of available loans (modal screen), we will give him the possibility to send a request to everyone If he has no desire to understand and speed is important to him.

We conducted 5 corridor tests that helped us find bad places in the interface. We think that this will greatly boost the growth of applications, but we DO understand that this will decrease their quality.

Result is +32%

We came up with 4 solutions. In total, we got a 32% increase in applications. Plus, we made extra money on promoting products and placing companies on the lists.

What went wrong? We made many solutions in parallel, so we could not find out what exactly gave the maximum growth. In the future, I would make features one after another or for different groups of people.

Platforms

Please be noted that all solutions work on four platforms such as web, android, ios. We also made the desktop version, but I don’t show it because only 17% of the audience use it. You probably have noticed that along with the car loans and leases, the design has completely changed. Yes, we did a redesign and technical relaunch of the platforms, made a design system and created main components. But this is another story.

Role

In this project I did research, prototypes, mockups and tested them. Participated in interviews and brainstorming.

On the project I closely teamed up with a product manager, analyst, engineers. I helped the product manager prioritize ideas, make users story and together with the engineers, we prioritized ideas according to technical complexity. I helped QA check the work of test builds, described bugs.

My work on the project after working on the interface was very positively noted by marketing, because I made a set of banners for the launch together with them, wrote texts for Release notes together with the engineers, helped illustrate the release.

Go to av.by finance